Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 7 - Shadow Puppets

by Orson Scott Card

  “It’s hard-wired into all of us. Not just sexual desire-that can be twisted any which way, and it often is. And not just a desire to have children, because many people never get that, and yet they can still he woven into the fabric. No, it’s a deep hunger to find a person from that strange, terrifyingly other sex and make a life together. Even old people beyond mating, even people who know they can’t have children, there’s still a hunger for this. For actual marriage, two unlike creatures becoming, as best they can, one.”

  “I know a few exceptions,” said Petra wryly. “I’ve known a few people of the ‘never-again’ persuasion.”

  “I’m not talking about politics or hurt feelings,” said Anton. “I’m talking about a trait that the human race absolutely needed to succeed. The thing that makes us neither herd animals nor solitaries, but something in between. The thing that makes us civilised or at least civilisable. And those who are cut off from it by their own desires, by those twists and bends that turn them in another way-like you, Bean, so determined are you that no more children will be born with your defect, and that there will be no children orphaned by your death- those who are cut off because they think they want to be cut off, they are still hungry for it, hungrier than ever, especially if they deny it. It makes them angry, bitter, sad, and they don’t know why, or if they know, they can’t bear to face the knowledge.”

  Bean did not know or care whether Anton was right, that this desire was inescapable for all human beings, though he suspected that he was-that this life wish had to be present in all living things for any species to continue as they all desperately struggled to do. It isn’t a will to survive-that is selfish, and such selfishness would be meaningless, would lead to nothing. It is a will for the species to survive with the self inside it, part of it, tied to it, forever one of the strands in the web-Bean could see that now.

  “Even if you’re right,” Bean said, “that only makes me more determined to overcome that desire and never have a child. For the reasons you just named. I grew up among orphans. I’m not going to leave any behind me.

  “They wouldn’t be orphans,” said Petra. “They’d still have me.”

  “And when Achilles finds you and kills you?” said Bean harshly. “Are you counting on him being merciful enough to do what Volescu did for my brothers? What I cheated myself out of by being so damned smart?”

  Tears leapt to Petra’s eyes and she turned away.

  “You’re a liar when you speak like that,” said Anton softly. “And a cruel one, to say such things to her.”

  “I told the truth,” said Bean.

  “You’re a liar,” said Anton, “but you think you need the lie so you won’t let go of it. I know what these lies are-I kept my sanity by fencing myself about with lies, and believing them. But you know the truth. If you leave this world without your children in it, without having made that bond with such an alien creature as a woman, then your life will have meant nothing to you, and you’ll die in bitterness and alone.”

  “Like you,” said Bean.

  “No,” said Anton. “Not like me.”

  “What, you’re not going to die? Just because they reversed the cancer doesn’t mean something else won’t get you in the end.”

  “No, you mistake me,” he said. “I’m getting married.”

  Bean laughed. “Oh, I see. You’re so happy that you want everyone to share your happiness.”

  “The woman I’m going to marry is a good woman, a kind one. With small children who have no father. I have a pension now-a generous one-and with my help these children will have a home. My proclivities have not changed, but she is still young enough, and perhaps we will find a way for her to bear a child that is truly my own. But if not, then I will adopt her children into my heart. I will rejoin the web. My loose thread will he woven in, knotted to the human race. I will not die alone.”

  “I’m happy for you,” said Bean, surprised at how bitter and insincere he sounded.

  “Yes” said Anton, “I’m happy for myself. This will make me miserable, of course. I will be worried about the children all the time-I already am. And getting along with a woman is hard even for men who desire them. Or perhaps especially for them. But you see, it will all mean something.”

  “I have work of my own to do,” said Bean. “The human race faces an enemy almost as terrible, in his own way, as the Formics ever were. And I don’t think Peter Wiggin is up to stopping him. In fact it looks to me as if Peter Wiggin is on the verge of losing everything to him, and then who will be left to oppose him? That’s my work. And if I were selfish and stupid enough to marry my widow and father orphans on her, it would only distract me from that work. If I fail, welt, how many millions of humans have already been born and died as loose threads with their lives snipped off? Given the historical rates of infant mortality, it might be as many as halt certainly at least a quarter of all humans born. All those meaningless lives. I’ll be one of them. I’ll just be one who did his best to save the world before he died.”

  To Bean’s surprise-and horror-Anton flung his arms around him in one of those terrifying Russian hugs from which the unsuspecting westerner thinks he may never emerge alive. “My boy, you are so noble!” Anton let go of him, laughing. “Listen to yourself! So full of the romance of youth! You will save the world!”

  “I didn’t mock your dream,” said Bean.

  “But I’m not mocking you!” cried Anton. “I celebrate you! Because you are, in a way, a small way, my son. Or at least my nephew. And look at you! Living a life entirely for others!”

  “I’m completely selfish!” cried Bean in protest.

  “Then sleep with this girl, you know she’ll let you! Or marry her and then sleep with anybody else, father children or not, why should you care? Nothing that happens outside your body matters. Your children don’t matter to you! You’re completely selfish!”

  Bean was left with nothing to say.

  “Self-delusion dies hard,” said Petra softly, slipping her hand into his.

  “I don’t love anybody,” said Bean.

  “You keep breaking your heart with the people you love,” said Petra. “You just can’t ever admit it until they’re dead.”

  Bean thought of Poke. Of Sister Carlotta.

  He thought of the children he never meant to have. The children that he would make with Petra, this girl who had been such a wise and loyal friend to him, this woman whom, when he thought he might lose her to Achilles, he realised that he loved more than anyone else on Earth. The children he kept denying, refusing to let them exist because ...

  Because he loved them too much, even now, when they did not exist, he loved them too much to cause them the pain of losing their father, to risk them suffering the pain of dying young when there was no one who could save them.

  The pain he could bear himself he refused to let them bear, he loved them so much.

  And now he had to stare the truth in the face: What good would it do to love his children as much as he already did, if he never had those children?

  He was crying, and for a moment he let himself go, shedding tears for the dead women he had loved so much, and for his own death, so that he would never see his children grow up, so he would never see Petra grow old beside him, as women and men were meant to do.

  Then he got control of himself, and said what he had decided, not with his mind, but with his heart. “If there’s some way to be sure that they don’t have-that they won’t have Anton’s Key. Then I’ll have children. Then I’ll marry Petra.”

  She felt her hand tighten in his. She understood. She had won.

  “Easy,” said Anton. “Still just the tiniest bit illegal, but it can be done.”

  Petra had won, but Bean understood that he had not lost. No, her victory was his as well.

  “It will hurt,” said Petra. “But let’s make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.”

  “You’re such a poet,” murmured Bean. But then he flung one
arm over Anton’s shoulders, and another around Petra’s back, and held to both of them as his blurring eyes looked out over the sparkling sea.

  Hours later, after dinner in a little Italian restaurant with an ancient garden, after a walk along the rambla in the noisy frolicking crowds of townspeople enjoying their membership in the human race and celebrating or searching for their mates, Bean and Petra sat in the parlour of Anton’s old-fashioned home, his fiancée shyly sitting beside him, her children asleep in the back bedrooms.

  “You said it would he easy,” said Bean. “To be sure my children wouldn’t be like me.”

  Anton looked at him thoughtfully. “Yes,” he finally said. “There is one man who not only knows the theory, but has done the work. Non-destructive tests in newly formed embryos. It would mean fertilisation in vitro.”

  “Oh good,” said Petra. “A virgin birth.”

  “It would mean embryos that could be implanted even after the father is dead,” said Anton.

  “You thought of everything, how sweet,” said Bean.

  “I’m not sure you want to meet him,” said Anton.

  “We do,” said Petra. “Soon.”

  “You have a bit of history with him, Julian Delphiki.” said Anton.

  “I do?” asked Bean.

  “He kidnapped you once,” said Anton. “Along with nearly two dozen of your twins. He’s the one who turned that little genetic key they named for me. He’s the one who would have killed you if you hadn’t hid in a toilet.”

  “Volescu,” said Petra, as if the name were a bullet to be pried out of her body.

  Bean laughed grimly. “He’s still alive?”

  “Just released from prison,” said Anton. “The laws have changed. Genetic alteration is no longer a crime against humanity.”

  “Infanticide still is,” said Bean. “Isn’t it?”

  “Technically,” said Anton, “under the law it can’t be murder when the victims had no legal right to exist. I believe the charge was ‘tampering with evidence.’ Because the bodies were burned.”

  “Please tell me,” said Petra, “that it isn’t perfectly legal to murder Bean.”

  “You helped save the world between then and now,” said Anton. “I think the politics of the situation would be a little different now.”

  “What a relief,” said Bean.

  “So this non-murderer, this tamperer with evidence,” said Petra. “I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “I didn’t-I don’t,” said Anton. “I’ve never met him, but he’s written to me. Just a day before Petra did, as a matter of fact. I don’t know where he is. But I can put you in touch with him. You’ll have to take it from there.”

  “So I finally get to meet the legendary Uncle Constantine,” said Bean. “Or, as Father calls him-when he wants to irritate Mother- ‘My bastard brother.’”

  “How did he get out of jail, really?” asked Petra.

  “I only know what he told me. But as Sister Carlotta said, the man’s a liar to the core. He believes his own lies. In which case, Bean, he might think he’s your father. He told her that he cloned you and your brothers from himself.”

  “And you think he should help us have children?” asked Petra.

  “I think if you want to have children without Bean’s little problem, he’s the only one who can help you. Of course, many doctors can destroy the embryos and tell you whether they would have had your talents and your curse. But since my little key has never been turned by nature, there’s no non-destructive test for it. And in order to get anyone to develop a test, you would have to subject yourself to examination by doctors who would regard you as a career-making opportunity. Volescu’s biggest advantage is he already knows about you, and he’s in no position to brag about finding you.”

  “Then give us his email,” said Bean. “We’ll go from there.”

  CHAPTER 8 — TARGETS

  From Betterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com FREE email! Sign up a friend!]

  To: Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com JESUS loves you! ChosenOnes.0rg]

  Re: Thanks for your help

  Dear Anonymous Benefactor,

  I may have been in prison but I wasn’t hiding under a rock. I know who you are, and I know what you’ve done. So when you offer to help me continue the research that was interrupted by my life sentence, and imply that you are responsible far having my charges reduced and my sentence commuted, I must suspect an ulterior motive.

  I think you plan to use my supposed rendezvous with these supposed people as a means of killing them. Sort of like Herod asking the Wise Men to tell him where the newborn king was, so be could go and worship him also.

  From: Humble%Assistant@HomeAddress.com [Don’t go home ALONE! LonelyHearts]

  To: Betterman%CroMagnon@HomeAddress.com [Your ADS get seen! Free E-mail]

  Re: You have misjudged me

  Dear Doctor,

  You have misjudged me. I have no interest in anyone’s death. I want you to help them make babies that don’t have any of the father’s gifts or problems. Make a dozen for them.

  But along the way, if you happen to get any nice little embryos that do hove the father’s gifts, don’t discard them, please. Keep them nice and safe. For me. For us. There are people who would very much like to raise a little garden full of beans.

  John Paul Wiggin had noticed some years ago that the whole childrearing thing wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be. Supposedly somewhere there was such a thing as a normal child, but none of them had come anywhere near his house.

  Not that he didn’t love his kids. He did. More than they would ever know; more, he suspected, than he knew himself. After all, you never know how much you love somebody until the real test comes. Would you die for this person? Would you throw yourself on the grenade, step in front of the speeding car, keep a secret under torture, to save his life? Most people never know the answer to that question. And even those who do know are still not sure whether it was love or duty or self-respect or cultural conditioning or any number of other possible explanations.

  John Paul Wiggin loved his kids. But either he didn’t have enough of them, or he had too many. If he had more, then having two of them take off for some faraway colony from which they could never return in his lifetime, that might not have been so bad, because there’d still be several left at home for him to enjoy, to help, to admire as parents wanted to admire their children.

  And if there had been one fewer. If the government had not requisitioned a third child from them. If Andrew had never been born, had never been accepted into a program for which Peter was rejected, then perhaps Peter’s pathological ambition might have stayed within normal bounds. Perhaps his envy and resentment, his need to prove himself worthy after all, would not have tainted his life, darkening even his brightest moments.

  Of course, if Andrew hadn’t been born, the world might now be honeycombed with Formic hives, and the human race nothing but a few ragged bands surviving in some hostile environment like Tierra del Fuego or Greenland or the Moon.

  It wasn’t the government requisition, either. Little known fact: Andrew had almost certainly been conceived before the requisition came. John Paul Wiggin wasn’t all that good a Catholic, until he realised that the population control laws forbade him to be. Then, because he was a stubborn Pole or a rebellious American or simply because he was that peculiar mix of genes and memory called John Paul Wiggin, there was nothing more important to him than being a good Catholic, particularly when it came to disobeying the population laws.

  It was the basis of his marriage with Theresa. She wasn’t Catholic herself-which showed that John Paul wasn’t that strict about following all the rules-but she came from a big-family tradition and she agreed with him before they got married that they would have more than two children, no matter what it cost them.